Sunday 26 February 2012

Dragons in a Winter Wonderland by P. A Woodburn



Dragons in a Winter Wonderland
2/5
Dragons in a Winter Wonderland
by P. A Woodburn (link Amazon.com)

Genre: Children's picture/story book.

This is described for four-years and above. I flicked through it before I gave it to my son to read and immediately spotted two punctuation errors. I can usually ignore these to a point if the story is exceptional, but this is a children's book! How are kids supposed to learn if the books they are reading are poorly edited? 


On the second page was the sentence: The main road was boring, And the Door looked intriguing. Why the capital A(nd) after boring? On page four I noticed a full stop AND an exclamation mark: I don't want you even looking at it.!



Hmm, OK, moving on. The story was about two sibling dragons who, on their way to get garble juice from Mrs Gnome, pass the Door. The Door leads to the ordinary world of humans. Dragon Alice accidently falls through the Door, and her brother Freddie goes to rescue her. Here they meet Suzie and her dad out looking for a Christmas tree to cut down. The humans take care of the young dragons, and in turn the dragons take them back through the Door to meet their family.

It's a nice, Christmassy story and although I felt my son couldn't follow it very well because of the story's structure, he did say he liked it. The blurb suggested it to be a little scary (dragons getting lost) but it wasn't like that at all. There was a lot of laughter as the dragons saw snow for the first time. I like children's books to give some sort of message, and I felt this message was repaying kindness (the human family looking after the dragons, and the dragon family helping the humans find a Christmas tree).


I just wish the author had taken as much time writing the novel as he had illustrating it. These weren't shown all that clear on my Kindle, which was a shame, but going by the striking cover (which was wonderfully eye catching) I could imagine the book must be beautiful. 

Blurb - Dragons in a Winter Wonderland (link Amazon UK)

On a very hot day, two young dragons go out for a walk. They accidentally go through a portal to another world. Suddenly they find themselves lost in a strange, cold world of snow and ice. Too young to fly and unable to climb up the slippery slope they are afraid that they will not be able to find their way home.

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Remember my reviews are my opinion, and I am a VERY fussy reader.